A STRANGE CHARACTER AT BREAKFAST--"THE RAMBLER" AND HIS
ANTECEDENTS--WHAT HORACE TOWNSEND HEARD ABOUT FATE--GOING UP
TO PIC-NIC ON MOUNT WILLARD--THE PLATEAU, THE ROPE AND THE
SWING--SPREADING THE BANQUET--THE DINNER-CALL AND A CRY
WHICH ANSWERED IT--A FEARFUL SITUATION.
At breakfast, the next morning after the departure of the Illinoisan, a
somewhat strange character was called to the attention of the guests at the
Crawford; and a few of them, sitting near him, entered into conversation
with him when they discovered the peculiar habits of life and mind which
had for years made him an object of interest to visitors among the
mountains. He had been absent southward of the range, in Pinkham Notch, at
Glen Ellis Falls and other wild localities lying north of Conway, for the
preceding two or three weeks, only arriving the night before; and very few
of the persons then present at the Crawford had seen him except in
half-forgotten meetings in previous years. He called himself and was called
by others who knew him (very few of whom, probably, knew him by any other
name) "The Rambler," and his habits of life were said to justify the
appellation most completely, as his appearance certainly accorded with the
preconceived opinions of an itinerant hermit.
He was a man evidently past fifty, with a face much wrinkled by time and
roughened by exposure--with a high forehead bald nearly to the apex of the
head, long grizzled hair, rapidly approaching to white, tumbled about in
careless profusion, beard straggling and ungraceful and graying as fast as
the hair, and something melancholy and unsettled in the eye which indicated
that his wandering habits might have had an origin, many years before, in
some loss or misfortune that made quiet a torture. In figure he was rather
below than above the middle height, with a certain wiriness in the limbs
and a hard look in the bones and tendons of the hand, suggestive of unusual
activity and an iron grip.
But when they came to know more of him from the explanations of the
servants and a little listening to his own conversation, those who on that
occasion first met him had reason to confess that the Rambler needed all
the iron nerve and hard endurance indicated by his physique. They believed
him to be a man of means, and he certainly spent money with freedom if not
with lavishness, the supply seeming to be as slight and yet as
inexhaustible as that of the widow's cruse. He spent very little of it upon
his own person, however: such a suit of coarse gray woollen as he wore that
morning, with a slouched hat and strong brogan shoes, usually completing
his outer equipment. Sometimes he carried a heavy cane, but much oftener
went armed with a stout staff of his own length, cut with ready hawks-bill
jack-knife from a convenient oaken or hickory sapling and trimmed from its
superabundance of knots by the same easily-managed substitute for a whole
"kit" of carpenters'-tools.
This man, as it appeared, had never missed coming to the mountains for a
single summer of the preceding fifteen years. Whence he came, no one knew;
and whither he went when his season was over (_his_ season had very little
to do with the fashionable one, in commencement or duration), was known
quite as little. He might be looked for, they said, at the Profile, the
Crawford, the Glen, the Alpine, the White Mountain or down in Pinkham
Notch, at any time after they began to paint up and repair the houses for
the reception of visitors, in early June; and he might be expected to make
his appearance at any or all of those places, any day or no day, during the
fall season and even up to the time when the last coach-load rolled away in
September and the first snows began to sprinkle themselves on the brows of
Washington and Lafayette. He never remained at any one of the houses more
than a few hours at a time, carrying away from each a few sandwiches, a
little dried tongue, some cheese and crackers in a small haversack, and
sleeping nine nights out of ten in the open air, with no pillow but a stone
or a log of wood, and his slouched hat. Most of the time he was alone on
the tops of the most difficult peaks or at the bottom of gorges where no
foot but his own would be likely to tread; or he was to be seen dodging
across a path, staff in hand and haversack on side, as a party was making
some one of the ascents,--rather shunning any company then seeking it, and
yet evidently neither misanthropic nor embarrassed when thrown into society
and forced into conversation. Wherever he wished to go he went on foot,
even when thirty or forty miles of rough mountain roads and paths were to
be measured; and no man, they averred, had ever seen him set foot over the
side of a vehicle or recognize the right of the animal man to be drawn
about from place to place by his brother animal the horse.
So far the Rambler, according to the accounts given of him, was merely a
harmless monomaniac--harmless even to himself, as all monomaniacs are
_not_. But beyond that point, the servants and some of the old habitues
averred, came positive madness. He had been mad, since the first day of his
coming to the mountains and perhaps long before, on the idea of _climbing_.
Many had seen him go up to those peaks and down into those ravines before
mentioned, and found as little disposition as ability to follow him. He
seemed to climb without purpose, except his purpose might be the mere
reckless exposure of himself to danger at which every one except himself
would draw back with a shudder. And that he did this without any motive
outside of himself for the action--that he had no thought of awakening
admiration by such exhibitions,--was evident from the fact that he was just
as likely to make some ascent or descent of the most reckless
fool-hardiness, when he did not know of the presence of any other person
within possible sight, as when he had groups of horrified spectators; and
that loneliness was not a condition precedent to such an attempt, was just
as evident from the fact that he never seemed to desist because one person
or fifty came suddenly upon him and "caught him in the act." He seemed to
live in a climbing world of his own, in which he was the only resident and
all the others merely chance visitors who might or might not be in the way
when he found it necessary to hang himself like a fly on the crags between
heaven and earth.
We are making no attempt whatever at analyzing the mentality of this
singular man, whom many will remember as having met him during some period
of the last dozen years, at one or more of the Notches of the White
Mountains. As well might the attempt be made to survey one of his own
mountain tops or discover the superfices of one of the mighty masses of
perpendicular rock that so often afforded him a footing at which the
chamois would have given up in despair and Hervio Nano (that human "fly on
the ceiling") writhed his boneless limbs in a shudder! We are only roughly
daguerreotyping the man as he appeared, preparatory to one terrible
incident which made him an important character in this narration. Were any
effort to be made at explaining his strange and apparently purposeless
predilection, perhaps one word would come as near to furnishing the
explanation as five hundred others--_excitement_. One man drinks liquors
until he goes beyond himself; another invites to his brain the tempting
demons of opium, hasheesh or nicotine; another perils his prosperity and
the very bread of his family at play; still another plunges into pleasure
so deeply that the draught is all the while maddening agony; and yet
another claps spur on heel and takes sword in hand and rides into the thick
of the deadliest fight, without one motive of patriotism or one thought of
duty: and all these are seeking that which will temporarily lift them above
and beyond themselves (alas!--that which will just as assuredly plunge them
_below_ themselves, in reaction!)--excitement. Who knows that the poor
Rambler, bankrupt in heart, hope and memory, had not tasted all the other
maddening bowls and found them too weak to wean him from his hour of
suffering, so that when the frequent paroxysm came he had no alternative
but to place himself in some position where the hand and the foot could
become masters of every thought and feeling, that the rude minstrelsy of
deadly danger might thus charm away the black moment from his soul!
All this is mere speculation--the man may have been nothing more nor less
than a maniac; and yet his conversation, which was coherent and marked by
entire propriety, did not create any such impression.
No one who has made any study of the scenery of our Northern Mountains
fails to know that many of them (and almost all the White Mountains that
have full descent on either side to either of the Notches) in addition to
the bald scarred brows of cliff that on one side or another seem like faces
lifting themselves in stern defiance to the storm,--have chased down them,
from brow to foot, channels or "schutes" from which the torrent or the
lightning has originally shorn away trees, herbage and at last earth, every
year wearing them deeper and making more startling the contrast of the
almost direct line of bluish gray cliff, seeming the very mockery of a path
that no man can walk, with the green of the living grass and foliage and
the white skeletons of the dead birches, that border them on either side.
Perhaps no feature of the mountain scenery is more certain to awake a
shudder, than such "schutes," as looked up to from below or down upon from
above; as the thought of a passage-way is inevitable, followed by the
remembrance of the headlong fall of any man who should attempt a progress
so nearly perpendicular, and that followed by the imagination that the
gazer has really attempted it and is falling. Mount Webster and Mount
Willard, at the White Mountain Notch, are more marked than almost any of
the others, by such features; and certain terrible adventures along those
"schutes" make part of the repertoires of guides and the boasting stories
of old habitues. With one of those descending Mount Willard, and the
points of scenery immediately surrounding it, we shall have painful
occasion to make more intimate acquaintance in this immediate connection.
These "schutes" and their topography were the subject of conversation at
the breakfast-table that morning, not alone on account of the presence of
the Rambler, which might have provoked it, but from the fact that a pic-nic
on the top of Mount Willard, in the near vicinity of one of those tempting
horrors, had been for some days in contemplation and the wagons were being
prepared for going up and the cold food packing away in baskets and hampers
at the very moment of that discussion.
"You must know the mountains remarkably well," one of the gentlemen at the
table was saying to the Rambler.
"I ought to do so," was the reply. "There is scarcely a spot from Littleton
to Winnipiseogee that my foot has not touched; and I may almost say that
there is not a spot where I have not eaten or slept." He said this in a
manner as far removed from any desire to make a display of himself as from
any thing like modesty--merely as the fact, and therefore a matter of
course.
"I heard you speaking of climbing the schutes a moment ago, but I did not
quite catch what you said," spoke another. "You certainly cannot hold on to
the rocks alone, when they are so nearly perpendicular, can you?"
"Oh, no," answered the Rambler, "of course that would be impossible. I
suppose I have a sure foot and a steady hand, and those schutes always have
trees and shrubbery beside them, all the way down. It is no trouble to hold
on to _them_--at least it is not so to _me_."
"Ugh!" said yet another--"rather you than me! Such exposures are terrible!"
and he shuddered at the picture his imagination had been drawing.
"They may be terrible, and I suppose that they are so, to some people," was
the quiet reply. "Habit is every thing, no doubt. Some of you might walk
into battle, if you have been there before, a good deal more coolly than I
could do, even though you had a good deal more to sacrifice in life than
myself in the event of a bullet going astray."
"Bullets never go astray, nor do men fall down the rocks accidentally!" put
in a breakfaster who wore a white neckcloth but no mock-sanctimonious
visage. "I am afraid, brothers, that you all forget the Overruling Hand
which guides all things and prevents what thoughtless people call
'accidents.'"
"Ah!" said Horace Townsend. "Domine, do you carry fatalism, or
predestination, if you like the word any better,--so far as to believe that
every step of a man is supernaturally protected?"
"It is supernaturally _ordered_, beyond a doubt: it may be _protected_, or
quite the opposite," was the minister's smiling reply. "And I might go a
step further and say that every man is supernaturally _upheld_, when doing
a great duty, however dangerous, so that that result may follow, whether it
come in life or death, in success or failure--which may be eventually best
for _him_ as well as best for the interests of heaven and earth, all men
and all time."
"A sublime thought, and one that may be worth calling to mind a good many
times in life!" was all the reply that the lawyer made, and he took no
further part in the conversation. He sat back in his chair, the moment
after; and Margaret Hayley (who had now become to some extent his
"observer," as he had erewhile filled the same office to Halstead Rowan and
Clara Vanderlyn)--Margaret Hayley, sitting at a considerable distance up
the table on the opposite side, saw that his face seemed strangely moved,
and that there was intense thought in the eye that looked straight forward
and yet apparently gazed on vacancy.
Meanwhile the Rambler had not yet ceased to be an object of interest; and a
little warning (such as he had undoubtedly heard a good many times during
his strange life) was to follow the inquiries and the speculations.
"Then you probably do not think, Domine," said one of the interlocutors in
response to the remark which seemed to have struck Horace Townsend so
forcibly, "that our friend here is under any especial supernatural
protection when climbing up and down places where he has no errand whatever
except his own amusement."
"I might think so, if I had the power to decide that he was really
attempting no good whatever to himself or others," was the reply. "But as I
cannot so decide, though I certainly think such exposures of life very
imprudent, I shall be very careful not to express any such opinion."
"Well, sir, I certainly wish you no harm," said another, "but if all
accounts are true, I think that you expose yourself very recklessly, and I
expect, some day, to hear that the pitcher you have carried once too often
to the well is broken at last."
"Perhaps so," said the Rambler, without one indication on his features that
he was either frightened or moved by the suggestions. "I am long past the
middle of life--my limbs are not quite so nimble as they once were--and if
I do make a miss-step some time and get killed, I hope that they will allow
me to lie peaceably where I fall!"
After which strange wish the conversation went no further. Breakfast was
just breaking up; and a few moments afterwards some who were standing on
the piazza saw the Rambler stepping away down the road, haversack of bread,
cheese, and meats strapped under his left arm, and his weather-beaten
slouched hat thrown forward to shield his eyes from the morning sun that
came streaming low and broad up the Notch.
It was perhaps an hour afterwards when two wagons drew up at the door,
ready to bear some score of the visitors up Mount Willard for the expected
pic-nic. A third wagon had started ahead, bearing provisions enough to have
supplied a small army--all to be wasted or made into perquisites for the
servants by a frolic dictated a little by ennui and not a little by a love
for any thing novel or merry. Two or three of the young men staying at the
house had been up Mount Willard a few days before, and on their return they
had brought such flattering accounts of a magnificent broad, green plateau
which they had discovered (how many times it had before been discovered is
not stated) not far from the end of the carriage-road, on the southern brow
of the mountain and overlooking the cascades and the edge of the Devil's
Den,--that the effect produced on the as yet untravelled people at the
Crawford by the announcement was very much the same that we may suppose to
have been manifested at the Court of Castile and Leon when Columbus came
back with the Indians, the birds'-feathers and the big stories. The young
men had signalized their own faith in the desirableness of the land as a
place of permanent occupation, by possessing themselves of a small coil of
inch rope, lying unused in one of the out-houses since the re-erection of
the Crawford (after the fire of the winter before), in 1859, carting it in
a wagon up the mountain and to the tempting plateau, and there using one
end of it and a seat-board to make such a stupendous swing between two high
trees that stood on one side of the green space, as had probably never been
seen before in any locality where the clouds every morning tangled
themselves among the branches. One of them had declared that he had the
"highest old swing," in that "scup," ever taken by mortal, and a good many
believed him. The swing, with its hundred feet or more of super-abundant
rope, had remained as a permanence; a few of the ladies at the house had
been coaxed into going up Mount Willard especially to indulge in that
"scupping" which ordinarily belonged to low lands and lazier
watering-places; and for two or three days before preparations and
arrangements for a pic-nic had been in progress, destined to culminate on
that splendid cloudless morning of early August.
So much premised, nothing more need be said than that all the few persons
connected with this relation and yet remaining at the Crawford, were
members of the pic-nic party of twenty or twenty-five, a pleasant mingling
of both sexes but not of all the ages; that Captain Hector Coles and
Margaret Hayley went up especially in each other's company, as was both
usual and proper; that Mrs. Burton Hayley, getting ready to go on to the
Glen and a little absorbed in one of the ministerial brethren whom she had
found, did not ascend a mountain on any such vain and frivolous errand as a
mere pic-nic; that Horace Townsend rode up, in a different wagon from that
occupied by Margaret and her cavalier, and with no one in charge, or even
in especial company--precisely as he had gone up Mount Washington; that the
party, in both wagons, was very merry and tuned to the highest possible
pitch of enjoyment; that the usual jolts incidental to very bad mountain
roads were periodically encountered, and the little screams and jerkings at
protecting coats, ordinarily consequent thereupon, were evoked; that a few
magnificent views down the Notch and among the sea of peaks were enjoyed,
with a few contretemps among the riders adding zest thereto; that nearly
every one would have been willing to make oath that they had been "all but
upset down the mountain" several times, when they had not really been even
once in that threatening predicament; and that after something more than an
hour of riding they found themselves and their pic-nic preparations at the
end of the carriage-road and very near the diminutive promised land which
they had been invited and enticed to come up and occupy.
It was indeed, as those who had never before visited the place found upon
reaching it through a little clump of trees and bushes beyond the
termination of the road--a spot well worthy the attention of any visitor to
the Notch. Nothing else like it, probably, could have been found in the
whole chain of the White Mountains, following them from the head waters of
the Androscoggin to the mouth of the Pemigawasset. For the purposes of this
veracious narration it becomes necessary to describe some of the features
of the spot more closely than they would demand under ordinary
circumstances; and the reader may find it equally necessary to make close
application of the details of description, in order fully to appreciate
that which must inevitably follow, beyond the control of either reader or
writer.
At some day, no doubt many a long year before, whether caused by the
melting of the snows at the top of the mountain or by some one of those
internal convulsions which the earth seems to share with the human atom who
inhabits it,--there had been a heavy "slide" from near the peak on the
south-south-western side, coming down perhaps a quarter of a mile before
earth and stone met with any check. Then the check had been sudden and
severe, from some obstruction below, and as a consequence the slide had
gone no farther downward but spread itself into a broad plateau of fifty or
sixty feet by one hundred, nearly level though with a slight inclination
downward towards the edge. There had chanced to be but few rocks at the top
of this mass of earth, and the southern exposure and shelter from the north
winds had no doubt tended to warm and fertilize it, so that while much of
the top of the mountain was bald, scarred and bare, and all the remainder
covered with wild, rough forest--this little plateau had really grown to be
covered with grassy sward, of no particular luxuriance but quite a marvel
at that bleak height. Behind it, upward, the mountain rose gradually
towards the peak, seen through a younger growth of trees that had found
their origin since the catastrophe which swept away all their predecessors.
On both sides the thick tangled woods closed down heavily, leaving no view
in either direction, except through their swaying branches; while in the
direction of the slide itself, no tree intervening between the plateau and
its edge, one of the most beautiful perspectives of the whole mountain
range spread itself out to the admiring gaze.
Looking close as possible down the side of Mount Willard, at that point,
the trees and undergrowth of the gorge below, some fifteen hundred or two
thousand feet away, could be discerned, through that slight blue haze
which marks distance and faintly suggests the great depth of the sky.
Lifting the eye, it swept south-westward and took in a terribly rough range
of wooded hills and minor mountain peaks, with a broad intervale lying
between, through which glittered and flashed the little stream with its
white cascades which gave name to the spot, hurrying down in foam and fury
to join the Saco in the broad valley below. Further westward and at still
greater distance rose the mountains lying behind Bethlehem, with the top of
Lafayette, of the Franconia range, rising yet higher and beyond all,
touched with the warm light of the noonday sun and supplying a perfect
finish to what was truly an enchanting picture.
But at the edge of the plateau itself lay that which must command the most
special notice in this connection. Whether formed before the slide or
consequent upon it, one of the most precipitous of all the "schutes" of the
mountains had its start at the very centre. It had worn away the earth of
the plateau in the middle, until it reduced it nearly to the stone of the
first formation; while at the side of the narrow trough thus formed, thick
trees and undergrowth clustered as far down as the eye could extend, with
one sharp bend outward at the right, and striking out still beyond that,
the massive roots of a fallen tree, of which the trunk lay buried in the
earth and covered with undergrowth, while one long thorn or fang of the
root hung half way across the chasm and suggested that there of all places,
above the dizzy depth beneath, one of those eagles should sit screaming,
that are supposed ever to have kept position on some such outpost, shouting
hoarse rage and defiance through far away and desolate Glencoe, ever since
the massacre of the Macdonalds. Still below this and almost touching the
stony bottom of the trough of the schute, another and much smaller fang of
root extended, the broad bulk of the side-roots forming a close wall
between the two branches and the hedge of undergrowth, almost as impervious
to the hand of man and as unfavorable for any purpose of clinging, as the
sloping stone itself. It was a dizzy thing to look down--that schute, as
some of the stronger-sexed, clearer-headed and surer-footed of the pic-nic
party found by venturing near the edge, and as they did not feel it
necessary to reassure themselves by any second examination.
The baskets and hampers had been brought over from the baggage-wagon, at
the same time that the party themselves made their arrival. Why it is that
people who go out upon pic-nics, in any part of the country or indeed in
any part of the globe, with high expectations of much enjoyment which is to
be found in other modes than the use of the masticative apparatus,--why it
is, we say, that all such persons, even though they may have eaten heartily
not two hours before, become ravenously hungry the very moment they reach
the ground designated and are good for nothing thereafter until they have
rendered themselves helpless by over-eating,--why all this is, we say once
more, passes human understanding; but the fact remains not the less patent.
Let any frequenter of pic-nics think backward and try whether he or she can
remember any instance to the contrary,--and whether the conclusion has not
been more than once arrived at, in his or her particular mind, that the
true aim and object of the pic-nic, as an institution, is to enjoy the
eating of a bad dinner away from the ordinary table instead of a good one
properly spread upon it.
The party on Mount Willard was mortal, and they bowed at once to this
unaccountable weakness of mortality. Five minutes of inspecting the ground
and viewing the scenery; and then, while the more selfish members of the
company or those who had eaten heartier breakfasts, flirted, strolled, or
indulged in the doubtful pleasures of the swing (which hung between two
tall trees at the left of the plateau, with a loose hundred feet of rope at
the root of one), the less selfish or the more hungry applied themselves to
spreading out on the dry sward the half dozen of cloths that had been
brought up from the hotel, and to laying out upon it, in various stages
and phases of damage and disarrangement, eatables which had been
appetizing enough when they left the Crawford, but of which, now, they
would have been seriously puzzled to separate the fish from the farina or
the maccaroni from the mustard.
The helpful ladies and their male assistants had just succeeded in
producing that amount of confusion among the articles on the spread
table-cloths which was supposed to represent arranging the lunch,--and the
call for volunteers to disarrange it more effectually with forks and
fingers was about to be made,--when one of the gentlemen looked up suddenly
as a shadow passed him.
"Our friend the Rambler," he said as the other, with a slight nod,
recognized his notice and passed on down the plateau towards the thicket at
the north-western edge.
"Why yes," said one of the ladies. "He walked and we rode, and yet he seems
to have been up before us, for he is coming down from the farthest side of
the mountain."
"Shall I call him and ask him to take a share in our dinner?" asked one of
the male stewards.
"No, it would be useless: the Rambler, they say, generally chooses his own
society, and he probably would not even thank us for the invitation,"
answered another. The strange man had by that time passed into the thicket
bordering the edge of the schute at the right, and was seen no longer. Some
of the pic-nickers noticed, as he passed, that he had no stick in his hands
and that his almost invariable companion, the haversack, was missing from
his side. But there seemed to be no occasion of commenting on so slight a
matter, and nothing was said with reference to it.
It must be confessed that among those who had not contributed in any way to
the spreading of the miscellaneous dinner upon the ground, were two persons
in whom this narration maintains a peculiar interest--Horace Townsend,
lawyer, and Margaret Hayley, gentlewoman. The lady had been among the early
visitors to the swing; and at the time of the disappearance of the Rambler
into the thicket at the edge of the schute, she was being swept backward
and forward in the air by that dizzying contrivance, at a rate which sent
her loosened wealth of dark hair and her light summer drapery floating
about in equal negligence and profusion, while the dainty white hands held
fast to the rope with a tenacity which showed them to possess a commendable
degree of nerve, and the trim dark gaiter enclosing her Arab foot, and the
spotless stocking that rose above it, had both just that measure of display
which preserved the extremest bound of delicacy and yet made the whole
spectacle strangely bewitching. Perhaps the extraordinary light in her eye
as she swung may have been a little influenced by one of the two pairs of
hands that supplied the careful impelling force; for those hands certainly
belonged to the lawyer, who had been a member of the idle section from the
beginning, while she had wilfully attached herself to it in spite of the
expostulations of the Captain. That gallant officer, by the way, had been
retained among the dinner-purveyors by the wiles and the threats of a
little dark-eyed minx from Providence, who cared no more for him than she
did for her shoe-lace, but who would flirt with him and make him flirt with
her, because she saw that he was arrogant, shoulder-strapped, and very much
afraid of being seen for a moment absent from the side of Margaret Hayley.
The Captain, who was not quite fool enough to believe that he had really
made a military conquest of the young Yankee girl, probably objurgated her
in his heart for her charming impudence; while Margaret, more gratified by
the relief than she cared to make manifest, may have made private
calculations of hugging that dear little tormentor the first moment when
she could catch her alone.
Such was the aspect of affairs--the young girl in the swing, Townsend and
another gentleman swinging her, half a dozen merry young men and girls
gathered around the trees or lying lazily on the grass, and the other and
more industrious half-score kneeling and bending and squatting around the
table-cloths at U. C. of the plateau,--when the arrangements (or
mis-arrangements) were judged to be complete and one of the male members of
the working-detail, a little hungry and disposed to be more than a little
witty, made up one hand into the shape of a trumpet and bawled through it:
"Oh yes,--oh yes!--know all men and several women by these presents that
the regal banquet is spread and that those who intend to eat are required
to eat now or ever after hold their pieces--if they can find any to hold!"
A merry farce--the very incarnation of thoughtless jollity,--the dinner and
the announcement. It rung out over the plateau, heard by all and certain to
be heeded by all; to be succeeded the very instant after by a sound that no
member of that company will ever forget until his dying day. A scream of
mortal agony and terror that seemed to rise from the depths of the schute,
nondescript in some respects, as unlike what any one then present had ever
heard, but unmistakably human because the last sounds of every repetition
shaped themselves into words that could be distinguished:
"Help!--help!--help!"
For one moment that fearful cry ceased and during that moment all was
silence among the pic-nickers. For that instant, too, probably more than
half the company believed that whatever the sound might be, it was the
prank of some unscrupulous joker, hidden away in the undergrowth near the
edge of the schute and intended to frighten the ladies out of any appetite
for their dinner. The time of its coming, immediately following the
dinner-call, was certainly favorable to that supposition. But when it
commenced again, the very instant after, louder and more shrill, so
evidently coming up from the depth below, the thought of practical jest
vanished and every cheek grew deadly white with the certainty that some
tragedy was being enacted near them, that human eye must be blasted by
seeing and that human hand could probably find no power to avert.
It would have seemed the most unlikely of all things, when that ambiguous
banquet on the top of the mountain was spread, that it should never be
eaten; and yet the fates had so destined. Old Ancaeus had quite as little
faith in the prediction of the slave whom he overworked in his vineyard,
that he should never taste of the product of the vines; and when he held
the cup in his hand and the red wine was bubbling to the brim, ready to
show the audacious prophet the fallacy of his prediction, the muttered:
"There's many a slip between the cup and the lip!" no doubt fell upon
incredulous ears. But even then the cry rang out that called him to the
Hunt of the Calydonian Boar, and the spirit of the warrior was higher than
the pride of the wine-grower and the hard master. The heavy cup went
clanging to the earth, the blood of the grape flowing out to enrich once
more the ground from which it had been derived; and the tyrant hero rushed
away. The slaves had a new master, thereafter; and though Ancaeus may have
supped with the gods on Olympus, on the night when the great fight was
over, he never tasted of that wine of his vineyard which had once even been
lifted to his lips! So tasted not the diners on that mountain in a far
distant land from that which held Olympus, even when the feast was spread
and the call had been made for their gathering.
It is impossible to say what point of time elapsed before any member of
that horrified company remembered the Rambler, his habits, the conversation
of that morning, and the fact that he had only a few moments before been
seen going in the direction from which that piteous cry was coming up. It
is impossible to measure it, for at such moments ages of sensation pass in
the very twinkling of an eye. Some of them did remember him, with a groan,
and perhaps the thought was general. At all events the consternation was
so--as general as if some one who had come away from the Crawford with them
in life and high hope, had suddenly been stricken dead before their eyes.
Margaret Hayley, with the frightened cry which even then shaped a feeling:
"Oh, Mr. Townsend, what _can_ that be!" dropped from the swing and was
caught in arms outstretched to receive her. By that time all seated around
the table-cloths had sprung to their feet; and at once every member of the
party, male and female, impelled by a curiosity that even overmastered
fear, rushed down the plateau towards the edge, as if some horrible madness
had seized all and they were about to spring off into the great chasm
below. But before they had reached the edge all the ladies except two and
several of the gentlemen recoiled; and it was only by degrees and under the
compelling attraction of that still ascending cry, that some of those
remaining could force themselves to the verge. Those who reached it at that
moment, and those who closed up the instant after, saw enough to make
Blondin and his brother-fools a non-necessity for the balance of their
natural lives; and the cry from below was answered, be sure, by a cry that
rang from every voice above when the sad spectacle met the eye.
It was indeed the subject of their past fear who supplied their present
horror; and the situation, keeping in view previous descriptions of the
locality, may be briefly conveyed.
It will be remembered that at the bend or elbow of the gulch, some thirty
feet below, two fangs of the root of a tree stretched out partially across
the chasm, the upper long and at some distance from the rock of the bottom,
the other shorter and lying very near it. It will also be remembered that
beneath both the schute stretched its long blue jagged line to the foot of
the mountain, not less than fifteen hundred or two thousand feet, with the
air between the top and bottom looking actually blue from distance,--and
that the schute itself was so nearly perpendicular that while any object
falling down it would probably touch it all the way from top to bottom, it
would go down almost with the velocity of the lightning and be rolled and
pounded to a mere ball before it had accomplished half of the descent.
On that lower fang of the root hung the Rambler--those who had seen him at
the Crawford recognized him at once, at that short distance; and it was
indeed from that throat so little accustomed to call for assistance from
any mortal hand, that the terrible cries of agony and appeals for help were
ascending. One hand grasped the root near the end, without being able to go
nearly round it, and one leg was caught round the root farther towards the
tree, with the bend at the knee forming a kind of hook so long as it could
retain its tension. The other arm and leg hung down, with the body, below,
and the long grizzled hair streamed away from the head that depended
downward in the direction towards which it seemed to be so fatally tending.
The face could be seen, as that was turned towards the cliff, but its
expression could not be recognized at that distance and in the reversed
position that it occupied. All that could be known, to any certainty, was
that there hung a human being, evidently unable even to recover a safer
hold upon the root, screaming for help that was hopeless, and as certain to
make the last plunge within a space of time that could be measured by
single minutes, or perhaps even by seconds, as the sun was certain to move
on in its course and the earth to retain its laws of gravitation!
Was there not cause, indeed, for that general cry of pitying horror from
above, which answered the cry of agony and terror from below?